Elizabeth Hoover
We are merely the sum of our chemical impulses
—Don DeLillo
1
The chemical flames from the factory
smack their lips against your house.
You insist you are sober, but rock
your mind a lead bob scrapping the floor,
your body is an ear listening
to the humming tuning fork
held somewhere in its recesses,
in its industry, refugee dendrites hum low.
2
I have no business
trying to tear into your stupor
with biology textbooks,
formulas, facts—beasts
roaming algebraic storms
in my imagination.
3
In 1847 Alder Wright, an English chemist, synthesized
diacetylmorphine accidentally by treating
a base with acetic anhydride in an attempt
to find a cure for morphine addiction.
That is all I could find on him. Did he ever
learn what his medicine could do?
The math of it all—the improbability groaning
under its own weight. How could random chance
produce the brain, its rushing molecules,
a galaxy in its own right? And then give us the tools
with which to send it out of orbit?
4
I loved you—your bad grammar,
your broken paperbacks, your lank and ease.
Even now, in the sickly blue
intervals from the industrial plant,
I am struck by your body,
and I want to tell you
about the cascading signals
of the ear, the eye’s complications
and that I listen
to your ragged breathing,
an involuntary act that
nonetheless carries your signature.
I want to convince myself
you are not nodding but
swimming to some discovery
you will show me one day.
5
This is how I try to get to you
now that you no longer speak, placing you
in that timeline with Alder, cramming you
into fig. 1.4. after rapid intravenous injection
the user feels a warm flushing of the skin
and a unique orgasmic sensation in the lower
abdomen; this initial experience is known as
“the rush” but I believe in the soul
despite evidence to the contrary.
I believe it is of a high polished steel, singular
and seamless. It is followed by
a longer dream-like state known
as the “nod.” You hollowed yourself,
became an abandoned building. If only
we could rebuild the precious math of our industries.
If only we could rebuild with shinning girders
straight-laid paths, bright new concrete
not with words or metabolic work
but with charts and maps. Label them
until they are the sheen of examination tables.
6
You have finally dribbled off
still in the dark corner of the porch.
In a sudden blue flare I see your hands
open in your lap, stained heavenly
and deep-laid tarnish.
Elizabeth Hoover is a poet, critic, and journalist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her poetry has appeared in Plainsongs, Poetry Northwest, Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Folio, among others. She is currently working on a biography of Robert Hayden, and you can see more of her work at www.ehooverink.com